Confessions of a Reformed Pragmatist – Part 4

In my last two posts I pointed out that many churches are reaching the contemporary culture, (Some of them in large numbers.), without embracing it, two of which I mentioned by name. It must be therefore, that the use of pragmatic methods including contemporary music, are not as we are often told, necessary to reach the postmodern or emerging generations for Christ. I would like to take that premise a step further in this post and say that the use of music as an instrument of evangelism, is not only unnecessary, it is unbiblical. I alluded to this earlier when discussing contemporary music groups.

Now in the New Testament we are given instruction for how we are to use music in the Church. In Ephesians 5:19 and Col. 3:16 the apostle Paul gives us similar instructions. He tells us to “Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord,” To whom was Paul speaking? He was addressing believers, the Churches, not unbelievers and he instructed Christians to sing first “to one another” and second, to “the Lord”

In a sermon series out of Ephesians chapter 5 called, "Living In The Spirit" Dr. John MacArthur said, “If anything ought to be different in the Christian life it should be the music. Music is the expression of the soul so if we are redeemed our songs should reflect that. Redemption gives us a ‘New Song’”

Let me give you some of the verses that describe the song of the redeemed.

Psalm 33:1-3 "Sing joyfully to the LORD, you righteous; it is fitting for the upright to praise him. Praise the LORD with the harp; make music to him on the ten‑stringed lyre. Sing to him a new song; play skillfully, and shout for joy."

Psalm 40:3 "He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the LORD."

Psalm 96:1 "Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth."

Psalm 98:1 "Sing to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things; his right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him."

Psalm 144:9 “I will sing a new song to you, O God; on the ten-stringed lyre I will make music to you,”

Psalm 149:1 “Praise the LORD. Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise in the assembly of the saints.”

Isa. 42:10 "Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise from the ends of the earth, you who go down to the sea, and all that is in it, you islands, and all who live in them."

Rev. 5:6-9 "Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. He came and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty‑four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song: "You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation."

A "New Song" in Scripture is always connected with redemption. It is always the song of salvation. In his commentary on Ephesians 5, MacArthur says, “One of the greatest distinctions of Christianity should be in its music. Because the music God gives is not the music of the world… God gives His new creatures a new song, a different song, a distinctive song, a purer song, and a more beautiful song than anything the world can produce.”

I want to stop there for just a moment and say, that really based on those texts of scripture there really shouldn’t be any question about whether or not we should use the music of the culture in the church. It’s pretty clear that our music is supposed to be different. We are not supposed to be like the culture. II Cor. 6:14-18 “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: "I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people." "Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you." "I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

Why is this even a question? Why is this even an issue? We are clearly to separate ourselves from the world, and over and over again that is applied to music as we are told that our hearts are no longer to sing the kind of music that we sang as pagans. But we are to sing a new song, and I believe that means more than just the lyrics. That will, I believe become obvious as we continue this study. MacArthur continues.

“The primary audience for our singing is to be fellow believers, “one another”. Throughout Scripture the singing of God’s people is shown to be within the fellowship of believers. No music in the Bible is ever characterized as being or intended to be evangelistic. God may use the gospel content set to music to bring the truth to the lost and thus lead them to Himself. Since the message is so powerful, the open heart may receive it even though it comes with a melody. But that is not the intent for music, and when emotions are played on without a clear or complete presentation of God’s truth to the mind, such music can be counterproductive by producing a feeling of well-being and contentment that is a counterfeit of God’s peace and that serves to further insulate an unbeliever from the saving gospel.

It should be noted that the many contemporary entertainers who think they are using their rock-style music to evangelize the lost are often doing nothing more than contributing to the weakening of the church. Evangelizing with contemporary music has many serious flaws. It tends to create pride in the musicians rather than humility. It makes the gospel a matter of entertainment when there is not one thing in it that is at all entertaining. It makes the public proclaimers of Christianity those who are popular and talented in the world’s eyes, rather than those who are Godly gifted teachers of God’s truth. In using the world’s genres of music, it blurs the gap between worldly satanic values and divine ones. It tends to deny the power of the simple gospel and the sovereign saving work of the Holy Spirit. It creates a wide generation gap in the church, thus contributing to the disunity and lack of intimacy in the fellowship of all believers. It leads to the propagation of bad or weak theology and drags the name of the Lord down to the level of the world.”

Now there are several issues in that quote that I want to talk about. Most of them we will save until next time but I do want to finish something here that I started in the last post. I said that “evangelism is simply an excuse, a smoke screen, for an ulterior and far less honorable motive, for the insistence in many modern churches that contemporary music be used almost exclusively.”

First, let me say that many Pastors are like I was a few years ago. They have been led to believe that their worth as a pastor is somehow tied to the size of their church and that if the church is not experiencing radical growth, there must be something wrong with them or their ministry. This “success syndrome”, as some have called it, has done great harm to the ministry and the church and is something I hope to deal with in more detail in the future. As a result of this pressure to produce, pastors often find themselves grasping at any new trend that comes along, hoping it will generate numbers - excuse me, “souls”.

There are some, however, who bring this kind of music into the church and make it the exclusive or primary style of music used in their services, sometimes even to the total exclusion even of the piano and organ, and they do it with their eyes wide open. They know full well that contemporary music is no more effective than other styles of music, and yet they force it upon their congregation. So what is their motivation? Well it has to be one of two possibilities. It is either selfishness or idolatry.

Now you might say, “Wait a minute B.J., that’s a pretty heavy accusation”. Yes it is. But what other choices are there? If only one style is used and yet the church has a wide range of age groups with differing traditions regarding Church music, there is a very real and serious problem. (This would apply also to Churches who have members that like a more contemporary style and are forced to endure only traditional hymns to the total exclusion of anything else.) Having served as teacher of a class of senior members in the church I attend, I can attest that they as a whole feel as though they have been abandoned by the Church with regard to music. Sometimes they are willing to go along with if because they have been told it is “for the good of the church”, but they are very disappointed and disillusioned.

What kind of motivation would allow that to happen? Selfishness. Sad to say the reason the shift to contemporary music is made in many churches, is simply because it’s the kind of music that those in charge like and so it is forced upon the entire body. I’ve seen it happen. (To my shame, I’ve done it!) I’ve seen prospective pastors rejected because he questioned “our kind of music”. Dan Lucarini, a musician, "worship leader", and former proponent of contemporary Christian music said in his book, Why I Left the Contemporary Christian Music Movement, “the real motive for adopting CCM for praise and worship was not as we were often told, to evangelize those from outside the church, but was rooted in a need to satisfy our own desire for our favorite music.” It is certainly not done out of love for the Body of Christ.

Clayton Erb, Minister of Music, and Bill Brandenstein, Assistant Minister of Music, at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley California, (The Church pastored by John MacAthur), in a session called Psalms, Hymns, And Spiritual Songs And the Changing Sound of Corporate Worship, at a pastor’s conference held annually at that church made the following comments. “It seems that few pastors who force or allow a wholesale shift to contemporary music love their flock enough to make sure that they won’t drive out some of the saints. How many true saints are expendable because of a change in music style?”

Lucarini said, “I would like to point out that that there have been ‘victims’ of our self-centered, callous attitude. Our adoption of CCM for the church service has alienated, hurt and even chased away some of our precious elder Christians and other committed believers.”

MacArthur, in his book, Ashamed of the Gospel said, “The obvious fallout of this pre-occupation with the unchurched is a corresponding de-emphasis on those who are the true church. The spiritual needs of believers are often neglected to the hurt of the body”.

Now what about the motivation for a total transition to contemporary music being idolatry? We’ll pick up there in my next post.

Confessions of a Reformed Pragmatist – Part 3

In my last post I began dealing with the pragmatic approach to ministry. Pragmatism is a philosophy based on the idea that whatever it takes to accomplish a goal is right. In the modern church, what is right seems to be whatever draws a crowd. Whatever it takes to get people to come to church is deemed acceptable even if it is unbiblical. Of course great liberties are taken with the text of scripture to get it to say what the pragmatist wants it to say in order to support his premise. One of the many methods used to “grow a church” is the use of contemporary music.

I addressed in that post my past association with this philosophy of ministry, and I ended it with information about a book by Dr. John MacArthur that drew me away from pragmatism, and directed me toward a biblical understanding of ministry. Finally I mentioned Dr. MacArthur’s Church and ministry in Southern, California as an example of a very large Church that has been built on the consistent biblical exposition of scripture and entirely without the superfluities of the pragmatic model of church growth.

In this post I want to give another example on the opposite side of the country. The Church is the Tenth Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, PA. The pastor for the last 9 years has been Dr. Phillip Ryken. Before him the pastor was Dr. James Montgomery Boice. Dr. Boice led the church from 1968 until his death in 2000. One of their predecessors was the celebrated Presbyterian preacher and theologian Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse who was pastor from 1927 until his death in 1960.

Tenth Presbyterian is an inner city church and under Dr. Boice’s strong conservative leadership, it became a model for ministry in America’s northeastern inner cities. When he assumed the pastorate of Tenth Church there were 350 people in regular attendance. At his death the church had grown to a regular Sunday attendance in three services of more than 1,200. Also under his leadership, the church established a pre-school, a high school known as City Center Academy, a full range of adult fellowship groups and classes, and specialized outreach ministries to international students, women with crisis pregnancies, homosexual and HIV-positive clients, and the homeless. Since Dr. Ryken assumed leadership, the church has continued on the same course established by Dr. Boice. It has grown to an average Sunday Morning attendance of 1500 with additional ministries in place.

I mention numbers again only because that seems to be the driving force in the western church and the motivation behind the pragmatic ministry. And I want to share with you what Dr. Boice who pastored a growing church, has written about one aspect or pragmatism in particular, contemporary music in the church.

Let me first mention that Dr. Boice held degrees from Harvard University (A.B.), Princeton Theological Seminary (B.D.), and the University of Basel, Switzerland (D. Theol.) Also a prolific author, Dr. Boice wrote nearly forty books on a wide variety of Bible related themes. Most are in the form of expositional commentaries, growing out of his preaching: Psalms, Romans, Genesis, Daniel, The Minor Prophets, The Sermon on the Mount, John, Ephesians, Philippians and The Epistles of John. Many more popular volumes: Hearing God When You Hurt, Mind Renewal in a Mindless Christian Life, Standing on the Rock, The Parables of Jesus, The Christ of Christmas, The Christ of the Open Tomb and Christ’s Call to Discipleship. He also authored Foundations of the Christian Faith a 740-page book of theology for laypersons.

In his book, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace, Dr Boice writes the following paragraphs.

"We need to talk again about music. For the fact that worship must be an actual meeting with and adoration of God must have bearing on how we use music in our churches. This is a divisive subject, because music establishes emotional holds on people and we find it hard to give up anything with which we are ‘in love”. Yet we need to think about the role of music carefully, if only because it is so engaging and influential. Can we use contemporary as well as traditional music? The answer is similar to deciding whether we will use extemporaneous or recited prayers: It depends entirely on what these elements actually accomplish in the service.

If the chief end of the service is to turn the attention of the worshiper away from himself (and even from the service itself) to God, then the first question we have to ask is whether this is what our music does. Does it direct our thoughts to God? Does it remind us of something about God and encourage us to praise him for being like this? Does it recall the great acts of god in our salvation and evoke a sense of gratitude for what God has done? Or, on the other hand, does it evoke merely and emotional, claphappy feeling of euphoria? I am afraid that much of our music falls in to this latter category, with the result that people leave our services having laughed and shouted and sung, saying, “Wasn’t that a wonderful worship service?” when all they really mean is that they had a good time. They may not have had even one serious thought about God.

There is a second question we need to ask about our music, though it is harder to answer than the first question: We are told in Philippians… “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, what ever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Phil. 4:8). That is a clear instruction to pursue the best in many categories. And if that is true generally, it is certainly true of music. We should use the best music we can find.

God is worthy of the best. We must not offer him blemished sacrifices. Part of a minister’s responsibility is to point his congregation to the best in every area. Ministers should be lifting their people up to the best music as well as art, literature, and other things, rather than allowing them to slip downward to increasingly lower levels of the surrounding secular culture.

Sometimes we are told that music is merely a matter of taste. I heard that one summer from a pastor in whose church I had been speaking. I had been talking about a loss of absolutes in our culture and had mentioned the impact this had on Christianity. I said something about the need for better music and he challenged me by saying that “music is just a matter of taste”. He had agreed with my teaching about the need to combat the world’s relativism. So I pointed out that what he was saying was an example of that very thing. If there are absolutes, all music cannot be equally good. For aesthetics, as in other areas, some music will be better that other music both in itself and for what we are trying to accomplish with it.

I am not saying that it is always easy to know what music is better. We need the help of our musicians here. But if we have nothing else to go on, one helpful test is whether a specific piece or style of music has withstood the test of time, just as we might ask what literature is best by determining which of the older authors are still cherished…

This applies to the words we sing. The compositions of Martin Luther… John and Charles Wesley, or Isaac Watt are clearly better than the repetitious babble of so many writers of today’s ubiquitous praise choruses. Why should we commit our selves so tenaciously to what is manifestly poor?

Is the use of pragmatic methods including contemporary music necessary to build a large church and reach the 21st century culture for Christ? Evidently not. We have seen examples of very large churches in both ends of the U.S. that are bringing people to Christ, (in large numbers), without pragmatism and these are just two illustrations. These can be multiplied many times on many different scales in churches all across the country. I want to contend, and will in a future post, that evangelism is simply an excuse, a smoke screen, for an ulterior and far less honorable motive, for the insistence in many modern churches that contemporary music be used almost exclusively.

In my next post we will begin to look at the biblical principles that should characterize the kind of music that we use in worship.

Confessions of a Reformed Pragmatist - Part 2

Ok, I've put this off long enough. Well I really haven't been putting it off. I've been doing a lot of reading and research because what I share in the next few posts, I don't want to be just my opinion." Finally we have come to the point where we need to talk about Church music. And really this is where I've been heading this whole time, but I wanted to lay a solid biblical foundation about the creation and corruption of music. I want you to understand that music is not just an invention of man but was created by God for a particular purpose and that is the glory of God. I heard Dr. David Jeremiah make a statement one time that I think makes the point. This is as close as I can come to a quote. He said that because music was specifically created by God for the glory of God, that any music that doesn't accomplish that end is a prostitution of the gift. That's powerful. Now what we have to decide is this, does the music that is being used in our churches glorify God? If it does fine, but if it doesn't it needs to be changed. I don't know of any Christian music leader who would disagree with that statement. (Although I've been around long enough to know that there are probably some who would.)

Now you may remember that in my very first post I told you that I am in some ways a product of the Jesus movement and the Jesus music of the 70's. (If you haven’t read the previous posts, which began in February 2009, I strongly encourage you to do so before you read this one.) But as a pastor I was for many years also the product of a particular philosophy of ministry called pragmatism. (That first post was called Confessions of a Reformed Pragmatist", and really everything I have written since has been and is under that heading.)

Now what is pragmatism? Well in this context it refers to a philosophy of ministry that believes that the end justifies the means. In other words, whatever works is good, and whatever doesn't work is bad. It's really sort of a Machiavellian approach to ministry, by which I mean the employment of cunning and duplicity, even deceit in order to achieve a goal or end. What is good in this particular context is numbers, (Church growth).

I know, I'll be lambasted for that last statement because some will counter that their motivation is not simply for numbers but for souls, to reach the lost. And I will concede that some are probably genuine in that motivation. However even given that concession, even acknowledging that motive, does it justify the use of extra biblical means to get lost people to come to church? I contend that it does not and there are many reasons, which we will discuss later.

As I mentioned, for the first 15 years of my 25 years in ministry I was a pragmatist. And the reason I was, like so many other pastors, is because that's just the way I learned to do ministry. That's what I was taught. That's what I observed being modeled before me. When I went to pastor's conferences and read books on ministry the subject was always the same. Grow a big church, and here's how you can do that. It's still that way. And the people that are placed before you to teach you how to be a “Dynamic Pastor" are always the pastors of the big churches as if the pastor of a small church could never be an adequate model. And I was given a grocery list of means and methods about getting lost people to come to church and reaching more people and adding more numbers. And so I did them and I padded the role and pushed to increase the membership and grow the budget so we could reach more people. And we baptized a lot of people and we started a lot of programs and so I felt somewhat justified in how I was doing it.

Until one day I did a membership analysis. I began to contact and look at the lives of all those people who had walked down the isle in my churches and had shaken my hand and prayed a prayer and made a profession of faith and been baptized. And what I discovered astounded me. I found that I was reaching numbers. Attendance was growing. We were seeing lots of people become professors of faith, but they were not possessors of a changed life. They were not disciples. They were religious but lost. After 15 years most of them were not walking in obedience to Christ and his Word. Many of them were never genuinely saved and were deceived into believing they were, by an “easy believism” that started with a pragmatic approach to ministry. That's what I want to talk about in the next few posts. And we will address all these things in more detail later.

Now one of the things that I did in my early ministry that contributed to his end had to do with music. One of the things that I was taught by the growing Seeker Sensitive" movement in the contemporary church was that to reach the lost of this generation we have to change with the times. Now what I didn't realize at the time was the extent to which these changes would go. As I alluded to last week, church leaders today in an even more provocative shift in ministry philosophy, called The Emergent Church Movement", want us to literally embrace the culture and in many ways become like it supposedly in order to reach it.

But at the time and to the extent that was being advocated then, I like many other younger pastors, began to introduce so-called contemporary music into my churches. And it was easy for me to want that. As I said in the first post, I listened to “Jesus Music" and really over the years grew along with the contemporary Christian music industry as it moved from just a very few singers and musicians when I began listening to it in the mid 70's, to the giant institution that it became. It was a part of my life. I introduced my children to it. I promoted it.

Ten years ago I had a band made up of students that frequently led music in my church. It consisted of two electric guitars, an electric bass guitar, and a full drum set. There were others who also sang with the band that would today be called a praise team. We were “trendsetters” because no other churches in our particular area had made that drastic a move.

Now why am I telling you this? Again simply because I don't want anyone to say, He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just an old timer. He doesn't understand 'our kind of music'". I do understand. I was there before many of you. I listened to it. I promoted it. I enjoyed it. BUT I WAS WRONG! Wrong about what? Let me address that?

I want to be understood up front that I'm not saying that all contemporary Christian music is bad. You already know from previous posts that some of it is, but not all. I'm also not saying that it's always wrong to have instruments other than a piano and organ in the church. That would be an unbiblical statement and we may deal with that more. But I am saying that some of the music that is being used in worship services today has no place in the Church and that will be developed more in coming posts.

So what brought about the change in me? It was the realization that I mentioned earlier, that the vast majority of people we were reaching" with contemporary music, along with all the other pragmatic methods, were not true disciples. This became a huge burden and I spent significant time in prayer and shed a lot of tears over it. I felt as though I had wasted the first 15 years of ministry. Then not long after, I read a book that changed my whole perspective and philosophy of ministry. It was "Ashamed of the Gospel" by Dr. John MacArthur.

As we proceed through the next few posts I will share some of the insights I learned from that book as well as from many other sources. I should mention for any readers who may not be familiar with Dr. MacArthur and who think that the only way to build a large church is by using the pragmatic approach, (which will be more fully explained in future posts), that he pastors a very large church in Sun Valley California with a Sunday morning attendance of over 6000 people. He uses none of the pragmatic approaches to ministry that the Seeker movement or the Emergent movement advocate. Yet they baptize 50-60 new believers each month and approximately 75% of them are age 30 and under. Many are students at USC or UCLA. There is no dancing, no clowns, no Starbucks, and no gimmicks. There's not even a gymnasium or a bowling alley. Instead there is solid biblical teaching week after week, month after month, year after year. If you ask Dr. MacArthur what his secret is, he'll tell you simply, that there is no secret. “God blesses his truth.” It is that message that I want to communicate to you.